Agile Personal Development

Want to know the Top 10 places in the world for specific sport activities? This post, part of my Best Places in the World to Visit series, is a great place to start. Obviously finding the best place is dependent upon your skills. For example, if you aren’t an expert skier, you shouldn’t start jumping out of helicopters in the Alps somewhere. I’ve chosen these sites based on two factors. The first is the frequency the locations comes up on ‘best of’ lists on the web. The second criteria is whether it is a good site for sports fanatics of varied skill levels, not just experts (or beginners).

1. Provence, France (Bicycling). When you think of road biking, what part of the world do you think of? Some sort of Tour? Yep, that’s right, France is one of the more popular destinations for biking. While there are several areas within France with great cycling, Provence comes up most often. Avignon is one of the key locations where a lot of biking trips begin. An alternate location is the Loire Valley, further north in the country. Outside of France, Holland is a great location, especially for beginners, due to the huge number of flat bike paths everywhere.

2. Chamonix, France (Climbing / Mountaineering). This area of the French Alps on the border with Italy is the self-proclaimed “world capital of mountaineering“. The famous Mount Blanc is located here. In addition to the great mountaineering, it is also a good place for climbing.

3. Montana, United States (Fly fishing). If you’re into standing in cold water up to you knees throwing a small furry item into the water, hoping to catch a fish that you are probably going to let go anyway, Montana is the place to you. (Can you tell I’m not sold on this sport yet?) Montana, a state in the northern U.S., is the location for the novel and related film “A River Runs Through It“, which really increased the popularity of this sport. Honorable mention goes to Alaska, where during the summer you can fish 24 hours a day since the sun never sets.

4. Alaska, United States (Sea Kayaking / Canoeing). Granted, Alaska is a big place, so specifically the area around Glacier Bay National Park is where you want to go. Kayaking or canoeing around the glaciers combines beautiful scenery and lots of wildlife viewing. You may even see some whales if you’re lucky, hopefully they won’t be too close though!

5. New Zealand (Hiking). Take a look at these pics and you’ll see why New Zealand is a hiker’s dream. Pick one of the Great Walks and get after it. Some alternate locations include the Alps, the Inca Trail to Machu Piccu and Scotland, all of which have their own benefits as well.

6. Whistler, British Columbia, Canada (Skiing). In researching this topic, there are so many different options for the best place to ski. It really depends upon whether you want the high end, ritzy lifestyle, or the insane downhill kind only suitable for experts. The one spot that seems to be on everyone’s list is Whistler. This is also the site of many of the 2010 Winter Olympics events, so you know it has to be good.

7. West Virginia, United States (Whitewater Rafting). This location has some of the best Class V rapids in the world during the summer, particularly on the Gauley River. The Zambezi river in Zimbabwe, gets an honorable mention.

8. Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles (Scuba Diving / Snorkeling). There are a number of great snorkeling and dive sites out there, but Bonaire seems to pop up the most on the “best of” lists. Klein Bonaire is a small islet 800m off the coast of Bonaire, and is where most of the diving and snorkeling takes place. It is also located in a part of the Caribbean that doesn’t get as many hurricanes as other popular locations.

9. Hawaii, United States (Surfing). Hawaii is synonymous with the surfing lifestyle, specifically the North Shore. This is an area where I’ve stretched my criteria for being available for multiple skill levels. If you are going to surf North Shore, you need to be pretty darn good before you try it out, otherwise you might not make it home.

10. St. Andrews, Scotland (Golf). Duh! Anyone that has decided to torture themselves with this simple game that takes a lifetime to master knows about St. Andrews. This is the birthplace of golf, and the top pilgrimage location for golfers worldwide. Honorable mention goes to the Carolinas in the U.S. If that isn’t enough for you, check out this guy’s blog, where is he attempting to golf the world’s top 100 courses!

A few weeks ago, I identified 12 ways to develop your life list. Coincidentally, this is a hot topic right now with the movie Bucket List in theaters. If you’re looking for ways to develop your own “Bucket List”, I’ve put together a comprehensive guide on how to do it. This is based on my personal evaluations of 10 of the 12 ways to develop your life list. Here’s a brief summary of what I’ve learned:

• SuperViva. My first impressions were correct about SuperViva - this is a great site to get ideas for your goals, keep track of them, and even categorize them by different aspects of your life. It is easy to set up a free account and get started by looking at the different categories for ideas that others have and select those that you are interested in. You can also add notes to your goals (so you can remember a year from now why the heck you picked the goal) and you can even keep track of your completed goals. The other bonus is you get a weekly email with recent ideas that other users have added, and a reminder to go check out your list. Overall, this is a great site that I plan to use to track my life goals. You can check out my current list here.
• Life Tango. Initially I thought the brainstorming section would be really helpful. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out in practice. While it was really easy to write in your own goal, looking at other ideas for inspiration was difficult. Also, many of the goals that are listed by other users are worded too simplistically to be useful (e.g. “Japan” or “Travel”). Overall, this site isn’t worth it.
• My 50 Things to Do In A Lifetime. This site has a lot of great ideas to start your brainstorming. What I especially liked is their list of 50 suggestions for life goals. For each one, they have a detailed description of the goal, and why they think you should consider it. I thought almost half of them were worth adding to my list. They also have a lot more ideas within different categories of life (Travel and Holidays, Activities and Sport, Education and Learning, etc). to take a look at. If you like one, it is really easy to automatically add it to your list. The one downside of this site is that it is difficult to just randomly browse through other users’ goals. You need to search by keyword, which is hard if you are just trying to brainstorm. That said, this is a great site to get ideas.
• Day Zero. This site is more about trying to accomplish specific tasks within a 1001 day window (hopefully I have more than 1001 days to accomplish my life list, but you never know). I still plan to come back and check out this site when I get down to specific near term actions.
• John Goddard’s Life List. If you are going to read anyone’s life list for inspiration, this is the one. Most of his goals are very adventurous (in more way than one), but the fact that he has completed so many of them is amazing. Definitely a great place to start.
• 43 Things. This site is well known for identifying the key items you want to accomplish in life. I looked through the different categories of goals of other users, and picked a few extra ideas. Nothing all that unique, but it is another place to look.
• 1000 Places to See Before You Die. This book is definitely useful for identifying places to see in the world. However, there are so many places it is overwhelming to really figure out what you want to see. This book is probably best used to identify specific places within a location once you decide on your top countries/regions etc that you want to travel to. For example, if you really want to go to Australia, you can use the book to find out what to see while you are there. Or, if you are a world traveler already and have seen most of the major places the rest of us travel-challenged people want to see first, you can find some unique places to add to your life list. I wouldn’t run out and buy this book just to help develop your life list (but it is a good reference for where to take next year’s vacation).
• Smithsonian Magazine’s Life List. This was a really great source of ideas for places to see. There is a little blurb on why you should check out a specific location. Definitely worth a look for getting some ideas.
• Your 100 Things. I did get a few ideas from other user’s lists for this site. There are good categories to choose from, but it is a little hard to read the ideas easily. I’d suggest passing on this site unless you really are desperate for more ideas.
• Men’s Journal Method. This was the original article (a couple of years old) that introduced me to life lists. I really enjoyed it at the time. Unfortunately, it isn’t *officially* on-line (although a Google search may turn something up), so it isn’t that useful today. You can probably get the same information from the other sources I’ve listed here.
• Success Begins Today Method. This method involves answering some open-ended questions regarding your life (what 5 things do you want to accomplish, what 5 things to you want to achieve, etc). For me, this was a good follow-up to brainstorming by looking at ideas for inspiration. It forced me to really think about what I wanted out of life. However, I would have a hard time starting with this method - I need to look at other ideas first.
• No Opportunity Wasted. I haven’t had a chance to read this book so can’t comment. From the description, it seems like a collection of stories of other people’s goals and how they have achieved them. Some of them have gone to great lengths to make this happen.

Lessons Learned

As I tried out these various methods, I learned a few things to consider when developing a life list.

1. Looking over other people’s goals is great inspiration, especially for identifying what you *don’t* want to do in life
2. Some life list goals are ongoing (e.g. see a sunset once a year), others are one time events (e.g. go on a safari). You need to consider both types.
3. Consider adding a goal to complete things on a separate list (e.g. visit all National Parks). This keeps your life list a little cleaner and easier to focus on the big picture.
4. For each goal, add a short description and explanation of why you picked it
5. Looking at other people’s goals for inspiration is great, but it should be balanced with asking yourself specific questions about what you want out of life. It is your life list after all!

Recommended Approach

Here is my 5 step guide to developing your life list:

1. Set up an account at SuperViva for collecting your life goals
2. Review the goals within the different categories and select those that interest you (don’t worry if they aren’t exactly worded right - you can modify later)
3. Visit the following websites for more ideas and add them to your SuperViva life list (paste them in as a full list) - John Goddard’s Life List, My50.com, and Smithsonian Magazine’s list of 28 places to see
4. Work through the Life Goals worksheet from Success Begins Today to help identify other areas you haven’t thought about and add to your list
5. Finalize your list - remove duplicates, merge those that are similar and move those that aren’t ready for primetime to the ‘Backburner’ to think about later.
6. Go live your life! [I'll be evaluating methods for developing a specific strategy to implement your goals in future posts - so subscribe to the feed if you're interested]

There are a number of methods for developing your life list (see previous posts for my evaluations of 10 of them). After going through these methods, you’ll likely have a huge number of goals, making it virtually impossible to put together a plan to achieve them. Many of the goals are likely “tactically” focused, having to do with day to day goals, not life goals. There may be others not worded with enough clarity as to the real objective. You’ll need to to consolidate, evaluate, and refine your list. For me, I ended up with almost 250 goals after following the different methods - I definitely needed to refine them to keep my sanity (at least what sanity I still have).

I recommend this simple 5 step process for finalizing your life list.

1) Consolidate goals into one location for evaluation. As mentioned previously, I really like the SuperViva website, so I recommend using it for putting all your goals into one place. Use the SuperLister feature for adding a lot of goals at one time. Just paste in text of your goals, the site automatically creates separate goals, and lets you edit them before you officially add them to your list. Wow! Cool feature! The downside is trying to get your goals off of other websites. There isn’t always an easy way to export them. Just cut and paste from the site into a text editor, do some minor editing, and paste them into SuperLister.

2) Group goals by category for easier refining. Group the goals you are uploading (or already have on SuperViva) into appropriate categories for your life. For example, I used the following: Continuous Learning, Travel, Career, Family, Health/Fitness, Personal Finance, Relationships/Community, Entertainment and Unique Experiences.

As you group your goals, you will likely find that you need to refine your category definitions. I modified the Continuous Learning category to include experiencing new things, like sampling new food or trying a new activity like mountain climbing. I also wondered where to put my ‘be creative’ goal. My answer was to think of Health / Fitness as including mental health as well as physical health, so ‘be creative’ and ‘take time for myself’ fell into that category. The Career category was where I put ‘take a sabbatical’ and ’start my own business’. I also expanded my Travel category to include doing activities that normally would require travel, even if they weren’t at a specific location (e.g. taking pictures of sunsets since I don’t live at the beach - bummer!).

NOTE: This is a good time to backup your online goals. Export your goals from the site. It would be pretty rough if you lose everything - you would end up wandering aimlessly the rest of your life, with no goals to achieve!

2) Remove duplicates and merge specific goals. If you follow my recommendation of using different websites and existing lists for brainstorming ideas, you’ll likely end up with duplicate goals, and some goals that are similar to others. Delete the duplicates and reword the similar goals into just one.

3) Put goals that don’t quite fit on the Backburner. Another feature I really like about SuperViva is that you can move goals to a ‘Backburner’ list. This is very useful as you narrow your goals down. If there is a goal that doesn’t belong as a primary goal, but you still want incorporate it into your life somehow, move it to the Backburner section. This allows you to concentrate on the primary goals without giving up on your secondary goals. You can come back to them later when you establish the plan to achieve your goals.

4) Get Rid of Non-Specific Goals in Favor of Specific Goals. You’ll likely come up with goals that aren’t really specific enough to achieve (e.g. learn something new). Delete these, particularly when you have more specific goals that are similar (e.g. learn how to sketch). Keep specific travel experiences and delete the general ‘Visit Here’ goals. For example, delete ‘Visit Australia’ if you already have ‘Visit Sydney and Harbour Bridge’ or ‘Visit Great Barrier Reef’.

5) Move subsets of primary goals onto the Backburner. Some of your goals will be a one time life experience (e.g. watch a space shuttle launch, climb a mountain), others will be general life goals that will require a more detailed plan to achieve (e.g. maintain a fit and healthy lifestyle). Goals like ‘visit the doctor and dentist regularly’ or ‘exercise 3-5 times a week’ are all part of meeting this goal, so move them to the Backburner.

Another example are goals that will be completed when another goal is achieved. ‘Explore Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde’ will be completed once you ‘visit all National Parks’. Make a note under the ‘visit all National Parks’ goal to ensure Mesa Verde National Park is one of the top priorities, and remove the specific Mesa Verde goal from the list.

Following this process, I went from almost 250 goals to a manageable 84 goals with another 40+ goals on the Backburner list. I still have some fine-tuning to go, but the 84 goals seem like a great start.

Anyone have other ideas on how you have fine-tuned your life list?